erry Bergstein is one of the painters whose art Arthur Goldberg has collected in an evolutionary manner. In a unique combination of detailed trompe l'oeil illusionism and thick impasto, caricature, and distortions of scale, Bergstein paints a rhythmic world full of poetry, anxiety and mortality. Goldberg purchased five canvases by Bergstein, dating from 1987 to 1998, and a close relationship with the artist has devolped. Such comprehensive collecting not only documents the artist's development and history, but also maps the collector's changing interests.

Moodiness and self-doubt were no longer the focus of Bergstein's art in the 1990s. Funny Valentine, 1997, an extravagantly colored oil painting, is a cornucopia of ripe fruit that metamorphose into wildly funny animals; the black hole has become a deep blue Valentine heart. Bergstein, who found contentment at mid-career and great happiness with his current wife, artist Gail Boyajian, had great fun painting this work. Goldberg, at mid-life, also was happy in his personal life, philanthropy and collecting.

Goldberg's tendency to collect certain artists in depth is exemplified in his collection of paintings by Morgan Bulkeley. In the mid-1980s, a need to focus on alienation and loneliness was expressed by both collector and artist. Bulkeley's The Rose Door,1986, is a tightly rendered gray-toned image of a brick apartment building with a lone figure looking out of a window. By the 1990s, Bulkeley's art had dramatically evolved into what Goldberg described as "a wonderful period of fantasy right in line with my collecting tastes."

Among his Bulkeley paintings from that decade are a series of portraits filled with artist's tools and consumer icons: paintbrushes, Campbell soup cans, Band-Aids and beer bottles. E.Z. Bird I.D. p. 2, 1998, a large canvas, is a highly-charged fantasy landscape in which a variety of birds peck at such images of human refuse as a bottle of Rogaine, an old shoe and a baby's pacifier. The solitary life of the 1980s has been replaced with a hectic, energetic and colorful landscape as Bulkeley and Goldberg evolve in their parallel worlds.

Another Boston-based artist whose work Goldberg collected comprehensively is Suzanne Vincent. He first saw her post-pop portraits of cow-girls and punk motorcyclists in the mid-1980s at the Stux Gallery, when she was known as Suzanne Higgins. Although he was fascinated by her work, Goldberg was hesitant to "take a plunge with such confrontational art." By 1990, after attending numerous art openings, getting to know artists and their dealers, and sitting in on classes at Massachusetts College of Art, Goldberg grew more open to conceptually challenging art work. "In the early 1990s, I sat in on George Nick's classes and attended a Rob Moore critique and got perspective on how a master artist looks at art." He first purchased work by Vincent from her 1990 solo show at Gallery NAGA and since then has acquired two more portraits. The Legend of St. Lucy, I Can do it With My Eyes Shut, 1990, is a stunning self-portrait, painted in the spirit of Hans Holbein. Dressed in black, with eyes shut, Vincent folds her hands in silent meditation. Around her neck is a conspicuously large medallion containing at its center, a wide-open eye. Referencing the Catholic saint's martyrdom (St. Lucy's eyes were plucked out), the medallion symbolizes the unconscious mind.

A disturbing and thematically charged painting by Nancy Adler, The Power of Suggestion, 1985 explores figure, fantasy and the unconscious. In a startlingly real and evocative canvas, a recumbent image of a nude male figure lies stiff and corpse-like on a stark white sheet. The allusion to death and religion is underscored by the way the artist has provocatively covered the nude's genitals with an art book opened to an illustration of old master painting of a dead Christ.

A thematic basis for most of the recent additions to the Goldberg collection is the dream made visible. CJ Lori's introspective art explores the mysteries of the subconscious mind and human relationship with nature. Her dream landscape Still Thinking, bought by Goldberg in this period, depicts a neo-surrealist floating world where trees grow from islands whose ground takes the form of human heads. In another Lori painting, disembodied heads populate a forest, in a vividly colored fantasy landscape.

The sculpture that Goldberg collects fits in with this mood of haunting disquiet. Lori's paintings are complemented by Joseph Wheelwright's stone sculpture of a disembodied head. Emerging from unformed gray stone matter, this forlorn individual contemplates its own existence as it rests on its side. In Gail Fichtinger's painted clay Swamp Head, 1989, a frenzied man's head is covered with frog-like creatures reminiscent of Salvadore Dali's swarming black ants.